What the Tech 213: Yosemite Paul

In the latest episode of What the Tech, Andrew Zarian and I discuss the announcements from this week's WWDC 2014 keynote, a mysterious pending Amazon launch event, and how Intel's new Broadwell chips will change things.

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Haha, the thing with AMD is I think they go for the sweet spot in terms of price, performance, and features. I mean, I just put an SSD in this thing and it flies. And it hardly breaks a sweat running most demanding titles. I know we can't always get worked up over superficial things like core count ... I mean, my 8350 has eight cores ... it doesn't always matter, but I like to think it gives me peace of mind as more multi-threaded applications come out.

I even use the stock cooler and I have no problems with heat, but it's in a nice big case down here in the basement, so that might have something to do with it, too.

My laptop has an i5 and it's fine. I have a lot of respect for how well the current crop of Intel chips have turned out.

The Swift language had an important design constraint: it had to work with all the existing Apple frameworks from day one.

Microsoft could have used Java rather than C# because they were building an entirely new framework at the time:.Net. I think what stopped them from doing so were licensing considerations, not technical ones.

Google developed Go, and it shipped with almost no useful frameworks, hence is useful for a bit of scripting and web apps.

Your concern about lock-in is misplaced. That doesn't occur in the language, it happens in the complexity and depth of the frameworks. Those differences are the reason an application can not be easily ported between Mac and Windows, or between iOS and Android.

That Apple was able to significantly upgrade the language used to interface with the Objective-C runtime without bridge code or compromises, is a real technical achievement, and one which is welcomed by developers of these platforms.

I don't get how you can claim that this year's WWDC was just like any other. The breadth of announcements easily explains why things that'd be major features in earlier years were covered in just a few minutes. There are a few announcements which may even be interesting from a Microsoft perspective and I was hoping Paul would have some insight into that: it is known that Apple uses Azure on its backend, and it stands to reason that the cloud component for developers may also run on Azure.